No-Spend Grocery Challenge {Days 6-7 | February 2017}

So far, things are going pretty well for our No-Spend Grocery Challenge! Let me tell you about the past couple of days 🙂

If you missed the earlier posts, here they are:

Monday, February 6. Apparently my large pot of chili for Sunday night was way too big, so we ended up having chili for lunch and supper yesterday. We changed it up a bit by eating it with cornbread, then with hot dogs, and with some Doritos my oldest son brought home. Chili, chili, chili.

Then when we were done, I froze the leftovers (yes, there was still more chili) for another day. Whew!

As far as shopping goes, we spent $12.27 yesterday. When I took my daughter to Girl Scouts, I stopped for 2 gallons of milk and they had apples marked down, so I got 20 apples for $5. The guy at the register said, “You’re buying the whole box?” Yep. And with my pile of kids, they’ll last 2-3 days max. {Note – before I got his published, my 10 year old son baked an apple pie from scratch and used up 7 of the apples, so now there are only 2 left!}

Grocery money spent: $12.27

Tuesday, February 7. Today we had cereal & milk for breakfast and the kids made homemade mac & cheese with fruit for lunch. They also snacked on popcorn and sliced cheese in the afternoon.

For supper we had steak, mashed potatoes (made in the Instant Pot), and green beans (from the freezer). I told you on day 1 that we bought 3/4 of a cow last September and that means we have a lot of steak. The problem is, before buying the cow, we almost never had steak because it was way too expensive to feed it to our family of 8 very often. So we keep forgetting we have it and therefore almost never eating it still.

My husband says that has to change, so I’m going to try to start adding it into our meal rotation at least once a week and that included tonight.

As far as spending today, earlier I had to take my son to a dentist appointment and we needed to run into Walmart for some dishwasher detergent. While in there, I also grabbed a few other things… 7UP (my husband is working long hours at work and it’s cheaper to buy a 12 pack of drinks vs. him hitting up the drink machine daily), apples (not knowing we’d use up the rest of the others on a pie tonight), bananas, and a huge bag of Skittles.

Okay – obviously the Skittles aren’t a “necessity” but my daughter babysat my younger kids while we were at the dentist and that was her request for payment. A $6 bag of Skittles in exchange for over 3 hours of babysitting 3 younger boys? Sold!

Grocery money spent: $17.25

Total spent so far this month: $78.90*

*If we keep up this pace, spending around $80/week, then we’ll end up spending only $320 for the whole month vs. our usual $1400. Wouldn’t that be awesome? I really hope we can stick with it!!

How are you doing on the no-spend grocery challenge?